Sunday, November 28, 2010

This report by the Denver Post suggests some impropriety at the Adams County Assessor's office, noting that some of Assessor Gil Reyes' biggest campaign backers received highly favorable assessments of their properties. While the article does a good job documenting the declining property tax burdens of some of Reyes' donors, it doesn't really make the case that something improper or illegal is occurring. To do that, the authors would really need to show that those who did not donate to Reyes were having a harder time getting favorable assessments than those who did.

That said, this does raise the key question of whether we need elected assessors -- or secretaries of state, or sheriffs, or judges, etc. --- at all. Does the desire for reelection assure accountability in such races, or does it create problematic conflicts of interest with little added democratic value? I have no idea, of course, but it would be nice to know whether elected assessors actually do their jobs better than those appointed by county commissioners.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

I don't know why I'm still watching this show. It's freaking miserable. The first episode was actually quite good. The show started off in the middle of an airline hijacking, and each subsequent scene revealed more information about the hijacker and the pilot, to the point where it was almost disorienting to figure out who you were rooting for. But it turns out that clever editing and a slowly-revealed plot can only get you so far if the plot you're slowly revealing isn't all that interesting.

The plot is basically "X-Files" for dumb people: there are aliens among us who arrived in the 1940s, and the government is trying to cover it up, and there are evil shadowy people who will kill you if you know too much. Seems promising, but this show manages to make it really slow and boring, and they show us each scene multiple times through flashbacks in case we weren't bored enough the first time.

I could go on and on, but really the best critiques you'll find comes from Kay Reindl's Twitter feed. You can follow that live if you're watching the show on West coast time. But, at least from my perspective, the most horrible parts come from the portrayal of American politics. The president and vice president are portrayed as just two guys who happen to work in a modest-sized firm. When the president wants to talk to the vice president, he walks over to his office, and then the VP's receptionist has to give some story about why he's unavailable. Indeed, other than receptionists and an occasional national security advisor, there's no executive staff to speak of. The president makes his key governing decisions while sitting in the living room with the first lady. Oh, and the president and vice president are of different political parties.* By comparison, the idea of space aliens living among us is quite easy to embrace.

In a classic moment last night, the vice president, who has been scheming with some shadowy folks but wants to confess, is speaking with his wife, who is terrified. The wife says that some men came to their house to tell her to get her husband to keep quiet. (Some men came to the vice president's house? They just walked up to the door?) And these weren't ordinary men, she says: "They knew our kids' names!" Oh, my God, those must be evil, super-powerful men! How else could one find out the names of the vice president's children?

Yes, it's low-grade sci-fi, and maybe the writers don't follow politics all that well, but how hard is it to learn such basic stuff? This is NBC -- maybe some of the West Wing's writers are still at the commissary. Buy one of them lunch.

*We aren't told who is a member of which party. The president is an African American with a Latino surname who has a vacation home in Florida, suggesting he's of Cuban ancestry, and further suggesting he's Republican. But he also explicitly forbids the use of torture on detainees, so it's hard to be sure.

Monday, November 22, 2010

This song is one of the real highlights of Springsteen's "The Promise," the new release of material he worked on between "Born to Run" and "Darkness on the Edge of Town." There's a lot of amazing work in there (you could make a career out of the music Springsteen discards and still be better than John Mellencamp), but this one in particular is haunting me.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

There's so much to take apart in this piece of excrement. But just for one, is he really suggesting that Texas would have a more draconian justice system than it currently has if it were not (nominally) part of the United States?

Friday, November 19, 2010

For those teaching courses on parties or campaigns, let me recommend the West Wing episode "Opposition Research" from Season 6. The episode follows new presidential candidate Matt Santos (Jimmy Smits) during his first campaign visit to New Hampshire, under the tutelage of the more experienced but cynical Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford). Santos is up against two other candidates, a former vice president and the current one, who are already well known, well funded, and endorsed by many local prominent politicians.

What the episode does very nicely is depict just how important funding, activists, and endorsements are to winning a primary. Josh spends most of the episode bringing Santos around to meet with local Democratic activists. Santos wants to give policy speeches to thousands of people, but Josh keeps telling him how activists must be won over one by one, and that they are basically the gatekeepers -- convince one of them, and they'll send hundreds of volunteers to help you.

We also see a wonderful meeting between Josh and a state legislator, whom Josh is trying to convince to help arrange a fundraiser for Santos. (How many political films or TV shows feature a campaign manager speaking to a state legislator? Hell, how many even show a state legislator?) The legislator points out that the other Democratic presidential candidates have already contributed to his reelection campaign, but he hasn't seen anything from Santos yet. "Don't make this about money," implores Josh. "Money equals viability," replies the legislator, "and from what I can see, your boy has neither."

The episode demonstrates that voters have very little to do with the early stages of a primary election. Rather, there are a very small number of party gatekeepers who can make or break a candidacy, and they coordinate with each other through signals like endorsements and funding. Some very good books have been written on this subject, but West Wing will take care of you in under an hour.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

There are plenty of grounds on which to criticize RNC chair Michael Steele, but I didn't quite get this criticism from Gentry Collins, who resigned from the RNC on Tuesday:

In the previous two nonpresidential cycles, the RNC carried over $4.8 million and $3.1 million respectively in cash reserve balances into the presidential cycles.... In stark contrast, we enter the 2012 presidential cycle with 100 percent of the RNC's $15 million in lines of credit tapped out, and unpaid bills likely to add millions to that debt.

Maybe I'm missing the point, but what's the value in not spending absolutely everything during an election cycle? It's not like Republicans have nothing to show for it. Would Collins prefer that the GOP had a smaller majority in the House but more money in the bank? Does he really think it will be hard to raise a few more million dollars during a presidential election cycle?

Just as a slight follow up to my previous post, it should be obvious that those who are angry at TSA or who want to be free of government tyranny (as defined by a 39% income tax rate or guaranteed health care or something) are not really marching in the footsteps of the Civil Rights activists. Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., et al were seeking to make an indifferent federal government take sides in an important conflict. They wanted a greater federal role in promoting equality.

I'm not saying that these other protests lack merit, but let's just try to be a bit judicious and accurate in our historical metaphors.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

I'm seeing and hearing a rash of complaints about elevated airport security measures. And I'll admit these sound pretty bad. Probably the most detailed complaint I've heard comes from this blog post. I fully agree with the author that sexually molestation at the hands of a government employee should not be a precondition for flying.

But can we not get carried away with this? Too many people seem to be following the lead of the first commenter, who praises the author's resistance to TSA by saying, with all apparent sincerity,

Rosa Parks would be proud.

Airport security theater does deserve some pushback, and I think it would be great if passengers simply refused to comply with gross violations of their privacy that do nothing to make air travel safer. I doubt too many people will resist, though, since not flying is usually not a realistic option for people who have places to be and have already packed and schlepped everything to the airport. TSA has us, literally and figuratively, by the balls.

That said, this is not the great civil rights battle of our time. Passengers are not being hauled out of their homes or tortured or placed in prison without access to legal counsel -- things that actually have happened to American citizens in recent years in the name of security. Nor are people being turned away from the polls or told they can't unionize or being beaten by police officers -- also things that have happened to real live Americans in recent years. What's going on in the airports is simply a form of government humiliation that has hit the professional class.

Updates: This post seems to have generated quite a few links and comments, so I thought I'd elaborate a bit. I am certainly not defending enhanced TSA screenings -- I just don't think they are nearly as egregious as many other things our government has done in the name of security in recent years. Yet the level of public outrage seems to be disproportionate to the egregiousness of the government action. Here's a scatterplot featuring data that I entirely fabricated:

Why the outsized concern over TSA's activities? Because those activities disproportionately hit a wealthier and whiter population, i.e.: people with an outsized voice in American politics and journalism. That doesn't mean that air travelers are all yuppies, but those who are in the airport on any given day not near a major holiday tend to be of the professional class.

The amount of freedom Americans have handed over to their government in the years since the 9/11 attacks is difficult to convey. We've simply accepted the idea of the government secretly listening in on our phone calls and demanding private records from companies without warrants. Many shiver at the notion of trying suspected terrorists in civilian courts, and even at the idea of granting the accused legal representation. The last president of the United States brags openly about ordering people to be tortured, and the current one asserts the authority to kill American citizens he believes to be terrorists overseas.

But most of these measures are either invisible enough to put out of mind or occur outside of what most Americans can imagine happening to them. As long as it's just Muslims being tortured and foreigners being detained indefinitely, the price we pay to feel secure seems all too abstract. The TSA's new passenger-screening measures just happen to fall on the political and economic elites who can make their complaints heard. It's not happening to those scary Arabs anymore. It's happening to "us."

This story will likely get even more interesting next week as a broader demographic group flies for Thanksgiving.

Caddell and Schoen reveal an utter distaste for elections, saying, "Governing and campaigning have become incompatible." But let's set aside the moral repugnance of presidential advisers opposing democracy for a moment and deal with their argument on its own terms. Only if Obama renounces his reelection, they argue, can he do the truly necessary work to improve the country. This work apparently involves cutting spending. Why is he more likely to do this work if he renounces a second term? Because he'd be less beholden to the left and better able to work with Republicans:

If the president were to demonstrate a clear degree of bipartisanship, it would force the Republicans to meet him halfway. If they didn't, they would look intransigent, as the GOP did in 1995 and 1996, when Bill Clinton first advocated a balanced budget. Obama could then go to the Democrats for tough cuts to entitlements and look to the Republicans for difficult cuts on defense.

Right, concerns about looking intransigent should compel Republicans to work with Obama. Never mind. Why on Earth would an Obama who is not running for reelection be more likely to compromise with Republicans? Of the 18 presidents who served during the 20th century*, five lost their reelection bids to candidates of the other party; zero went down to primary challenges. In other words, if there's any pressure on Obama right now, it's more likely that he's feeling pulled toward the center than toward the extremes. Obama knows that the chances of him losing to a Republican are greater than those of his being deposed by another Democrat. Take away the reelection pressure, and what do you have? An Obama who's more likely to move left than right.

Now, back to the moral repugnance. I really don't understand pundits and pollsters who have such a hostile view toward democracy. What evidence do we have that leaders who are either uninterested or incapable of seeking reelection are actually better at their jobs? We have plenty of evidence pointing the other way.

Jonathan Bernstein notes an interesting phenomenon from the past year. In three different elections (Alaska Senate, Colorado governor, and the NY-23 special House election), the winner of the Republican primary was undermined in the general election by a conservative candidate who had the backing of disgruntled Republicans. This is important for the reasons Jon mentions -- primaries were designed to give legitimacy and finality to party nominations. If the primary doesn't really settle anything, then parties are much more prone to splintering.

Do three cases constitute a trend? I'm willing to county Joe Lieberman's 2006 re-election campaign as another case along these lines. Maybe these are flukes -- the Lieberman race occurred when Democrats were unusually split on the Iraq War, and the recent Republican races occurred during a time of unusual Tea Party activity directed, sometimes, against the Republican establishment. But if this is an actual trend, party leaders have a lot to worry about.

Sunday, November 14, 2010

So the nominee of the American Constitution Party (that'd be Tom Tancredo) won way more than 10 percent of the vote in Colorado's recent gubernatorial election. By state law, that makes the ACP a "major" party for the next four years, which comes with a number of benefits, including higher placement on general election ballots and easier fundraising. But, as the Denver Post reports, there are some notable downsides.

The party has to hold caucuses in each of the state's 3,215 precincts in early 2012. The party currently has 30 dues paying members to carry out this task.

The party has to conduct primaries, which is ironic since its own platform opposes primaries.

It has to appoint members to 17 state boards. Again -- only 30 party members to begin with.

This is all fairly amusing, but it also highlights some of the important differences between major parties and minor ones. Minor parties usually get the luxury of ideological purity in exchange for not bearing any of the burdens of actual governing. They run candidates to make statements or raise issues that are otherwise being ignored. There's usually little real chance of their candidates actually winning anything.

Now the ACP has a much bigger platform than it ever had before. I wonder if they'll see this time as a blessing or a curse.

I've been going through all of the original "Battlestar Galactica" series with the kids. It's been a long time since I've viewed most of these episodes. A lot of them are quite forgettable, to be honest. But the two-parter "War of the Gods" was interesting, as it apparently provided a lot of major plot lines for the re-imagined series from recent years.

Now, the episode is really quite silly. Count Iblis (Patrick MacNee) mostly walks around issuing bizarre, transparently evil statements like "My knowledge of the universe is infinite!" and "Do not be beguiled!", usually in response to innocuous questions like, "Would you like extra ketchup packets?" He's clearly trying to chew up some scenery, but it's hard to do that with the stupid dialogue he's given. But fans of the recent series will note some important developments:

The episode takes on a pretty transparently Christian good/evil view -- Iblis actually looks like the Devil when you shoot him, and the good guys fly around in a ship shaped like a friggin' cross. But the story gets a bit muddied when both good guys and bad guys suggest that they are just somewhat more highly evolved versions of humans. ("As you are, we once were.") Adama adds to this when he suggests that modern humans would look like angels to a more primitive people. This is reminiscent of the Baltar and Caprica apparitions (ChipSix and ChipBaltar) in the new series -- the show left it deliberately vague as to whether they represented some advanced technology or whether they were actual emissaries of God or whether there was necessarily a distinction between the two.

Apollo at one point is convinced that Iblis is an android. He goes to see the creepy Carl Sagan/Steve Martin love child Dr. Wilker to ask him if it's possible to design an android so advanced that we couldn't tell whether it was human or not, and Wilker thinks it's possible. Moreover, Wilker actually has some prototypes in his lab! Skin jobs, anyone?

Among the many events that Iblis brings to pass is the deliverance of Baltar to the Colonial fleet. We don't see much of a trial, but we do get to see the Quorum of Twelve sentencing Baltar to life in prison -- a justice the modern Colonial fleet was denied.

Iblis reveals that his voice is the same as that of the Cylon Imperious Leader, a robot who was programmed 1,000 years earlier back when there were still organic Cylons around. They don't really spell it out, but one can infer that Iblis had something to do with the machine Cylons' revolt against their biological masters.

There's more, and it's really worth watching just to see how the recent show's writers mined this episode for material. Also, there's some cool rope-dancing on the Rising Star that's not to be believed.

Thursday, November 11, 2010

So it seems like journalists are increasingly turning to political scientists for answers to political questions. Thank you! In return, political scientists are trying to speed up their pace of analysis, so that reporters don't have to wait 25 years to find out, say, the impact of Abscam on public opinion.

In keeping with this, be sure to check out the midterm postmortem in the Boston Review by Brendan Nyhan, John Sides, and Eric McGhee. No doubt political scientists will be learning more about the 2010 election cycle with time, but this is a pretty impressive compendium of all that we know so far about things like the power of the Tea Party, the impact of campaign spending, and the effects of roll call votes cast by incumbents over the past two years.

Also, if you're teaching about any of the 2010 races in the spring, be sure to pre-order your copy of Pendulum Swing, edited by Larry Sabato. It will be available for spring classes. I mention this because it's affordable and because I have a chapter in there about the Colorado senatorial and gubernatorial races.

One of the curious features of the modern U.S. House of Representatives is that Democrats tend to run the chamber with large majorities, while Republicans tend to have slender majorities when they're in charge. Check out the following chart, showing the size of the majority in the House for each congress since 1981:

Democrats usually have majorities of between 250 and 270 seats. The bulk of GOP-run houses during this time period, however, saw the majority party controlling between 220 and 240 seats. The one large Republican majority in this time period comes from the incoming 112th Congress, in which Republicans will have north of 255 240 seats. This is highly unusual for Republicans -- the last time they controlled this many seats, Herber Hoover Harry Truman was president.

Republicans often get credit for running the chamber with tighter discipline than Democrats have, but that may simply be a function of majority size; a small majority can't tolerate many defections. We'll know more about how large Republican majorities behave soon enough.

Update: I originally grossly inflated the Republican numbers in the 112th House. I'm not sure how I did this. At any rate, I've edited the post and the graph accordingly. The lesson, thankfully, is still valid.

Monday, November 8, 2010

It turns out you can debunk a few political legends with a quick glance at Electoral College results. Examples:

Lincoln only won in 1860 because the Democratic Party was fragmented. Actually, Lincoln won 180 electoral votes -- almost 60% of the Electoral College. Even if all three strains of the Democratic Party had somehow unified behind one candidate, Lincoln still would have won. There were just far more voters in the free states.

Kennedy only won in 1960 thanks to Chicago's Mayor Daley rigging the Illinois election. Nope. Kennedy beat Nixon by 84 electoral votes, and Illinois only accounts for 27 of those. Even if you give Illinois to Nixon, Kennedy's still president.

Update: For more on the 1860 election and its relation to the secession movement, please see this excellent piece by Susan Schulten, who, unlike me, actually does know what the hell she's talking about. Interesting point here:

A vote for Southern Democrats did not always predict secession. While a majority in Delaware and Maryland voted Southern Democrat, those states remained loyal. Conversely, in Tennessee Bell actually defeated Breckinridge, even though that state seceded in early June. Kentucky and North Carolina were split between the two parties, and while the former remained in the Union, the latter did not. The winner-take-all model of the Electoral College obscures this complexity.

Are the swings in midterm elections getting bigger? Look at Brendan Nyhan's graph below. 1994 had the biggest loss for the president's party in half a century. That was followed by two midterms in which the president's party actually gained seats -- also unheard of in the previous half century. Then in 2010, we saw a larger loss for the president's party than we even saw in 1994. As I mentioned previously, these extremes are not well explained by the economy. The four biggest outliers in midterm elections relative to economic growth occurred in just the last five midterms cycles.

If the swings are getting bigger, what might account for this? I don't really have the hardcore evidence to prove this, but it strikes me that it's not a coincidence that the swings are growing at a time when parties are becoming increasingly strong and unified.

Greg Koger, Matt Lebo, and Jamie Carson put out an article earlier this year showing that members of Congress get punished for voting too much with their parties. This is consistent my finding with Steve Greene that the health care vote cost supporters roughly 5 percentage points in the election and with Eric McGhee's finding that the stimulus vote and the cap-and-trade vote also took a few percentage points off the vote shares of their supporters.

Why do members get punished for voting with their parties? Because parties are not interested in pushing through popular legislation. Parties have longstanding priorities (health care reform, tax reductions for the wealthy, etc.) that are molded and favored by the most active and passionate leaders within the parties. These goals are priorities for the parties over many decades and do not wax or wane with public sentiment. Indeed, in most cases, these priorities will run against public opinion. After all, if everyone favored something, it would probably already be law -- it wouldn't take a whole lot of energy by a unified party to press for it.

So, yes, the Democrats did suffer this year because of the poor economy. But they also suffered because they actually used their majority to do something. No doubt a number of Democratic members of Congress -- particularly those who lost last week -- did not appreciate the pressure put on them to cast party-line votes on things like health care and the stimulus and would rather still be employed and still be in the majority. On the other hand, if most Democrats were offered the chance to still have the majority in exchange for not having any of their legislative accomplishments over the past two years, what would they choose?

Were poor youth turnout and high elderly turnout responsible for the Democratic slaughter on Tuesday? William Galston is skeptical:

The conventional wisdom before November 2 was that seniors enraged or terrified by changes in Medicare would turn out in droves to punish those who voted for health reform while young people disillusioned by Obama’s failure to create the New Jerusalem would abstain. That did happen, but only to a modest degree. Voters of ages 18-29 constituted 12 percent of the electorate in 2006; 11 percent in 2010. Voters over 65 were 19 percent of the total in 2006; 23 percent in 2010—noticeable but hardly decisive.

Okay, but Galston ignores an important trend: the electorate has polarized by age group considerably since 2006. In 2006, 60% of 18-29 year olds voted Democratic, compared to 49% of 65+ voters. That's an 11-point difference. In 2010, 57% of 18-29 year olds voted Democratic, compared to 38% of 65+ voters. That's a 19-point difference. The increasing Democratic tendency of young voters relative to older voters made their failure to vote much costlier for Democrats than it would have been a few years ago.

Back in September, Steven Greene and I did some preliminary research finding that Democratic House members who had voted for health care reform were running about three points behind those who voted against it. Well, now that the election is over, we figured we'd check to see how those candidates made out.

Using the same analysis we did last time, only predicting vote share rather than polling results, we find that Democratic House members who voted for health care reform did an average of 5.2 percentage points worse than those who voted against it. This effect is statistically significant. This is controlling for district partisanship and the members' ideal points (an estimation of their overall voting record).

Suffice it to say this is a huge effect. As it turns out, of the 41 House Democrats we examined, nine eight of them who supported health reform ended up losing by less than 5.2 points: Carney (PA), Kilpatrick (AZ), Klein (FL), Mollohan (WV), Perriello (VA), Pomeroy (ND), Salazar (CO), Spratt (SC), Wilson (OH). That is, the analysis suggests that had those folks voted against health reform, they'd still have jobs in Congress. Now, this is a pretty simplistic analysis -- we don't know whether Democrats would have fared better or worse overall if health reform had failed, for example -- but it's still a pretty astonishing effect for one vote.

Conversely, we find that five Democratic members who did get reelected would be out of a job today if they'd voted yes on health reform. These include Altmire (PA), Chandler (KY), Matheson (UT), McIntyre (NC), and Shuler (NC).

We ran the same analysis for two other controversial votes, the stimulus and cap-and-trade. We found no statistically significant effect for either of those votes. (This is somewhat different from Eric McGhee's findings, so Eric, Steve, and I will need to hammer this all out over beers in Chicago next April.)

Some caveats: This does not include the entire Democratic caucus -- just the 41 members from the 50 most conservative Democratic-held districts who were running for reelection. We'll expand our analysis on this soon. It also doesn't control for spending, although most analyses I've seen on that suggests the effect was kind of a wash.

I've done some previous reflection on how to interpret the fact that Democrats finally following through on a longstanding party commitment appears to have hurt them dearly. For more on this, I'd suggest reading Jonathan Bernstein, who suggests that delivering on this goal was worth losing an election over. I still maintain that health reform will be popular and untouchable, along the lines of Social Security, in the coming decades, but we're not there now. It's currently unpopular. If it were popular, it would have happened a long time ago. Instead, what it took was a determined and (relatively) unified party with sizable majorities in both chambers. Going against public opinion is a big part of what strong parties do, and it's not surprising that there's occasionally a large price to be paid.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

If reports are correct, Republicans have finally won enough seats in the Colorado state house to claim a majority. Which means the coming session will feature a Democratic executive branch, a Democratic Senate, and a Republican House.

As loyal readers of this blog are no doubt aware, my forecast of the midterm election was pretty wide of the mark. We don't know the exact number of House seats the Republicans have gained yet, but it looks to be around 65 seats. (I've updated the scatterplot above using this figure.) I had predicted 40 seats, with a 28-seat margin of error. So, while 65 seats is within that margin, it's really out in the tails. And as the scatterplot above shows, it's a huge outlier. I am gratified somewhat that most other forecasters missed it by a lot, too, but the question remains: why did we miss this?

John Sides offers a bit of speculation. One thing he touches on is the importance of candidate recruitment -- the favorable political conditions for Republicans made it easier to recruit high-quality candidates this year. Contrast this with 1994. Yes, Republicans recruited heavily that year, as it was clear that conditions were running against the Democrats, but few believed that the GOP would really take the House that year until right before it happened. Democrats had held the House for forty years; a Democratic House was believed to a permanent part of the political environment. Today, we know that the House can flip back and forth. It was clear by mid-2009 that the economy wouldn't be expanding robustly any time soon, that unemployment was going to remain high, and that Obama's popularity wasn't likely to surge. Add to that the knowledge that a decent set of GOP candidates could actually flip the House, plus a nascent Tea Party movement that was producing potential candidates, and you have a great recruiting environment.

I'm not saying that's the only reason the GOP won so many seats, but it might contribute to it. I'm still wondering about other reasons. I can't help noticing, for example, that the four biggest outliers in the above scatterplot are from the last five midterm elections. Perhaps large swings are a feature of stronger partisanship, or nationalized elections, or something else. But the swings are getting larger.

Meanwhile, a spot of good news for my forecasts: I predicted that Republicans would take over 16 legislative chambers. It looks like they've taken 18, although there are still a few that are up in the air (including the Colorado House).

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

I have a bet with my colleague Peter Hanson over whose freshman seminar students can produce the best midterm forecasts. Here are the mean predictions for how many seats the Democrats will control in the House and Senate after tonight:

Monday, November 1, 2010

A somewhat belated note on the passing of Ted Sorensen. Sorensen once came to speak at a speechwriting class I attended at George Washington University in the mid-1990s. We began the class by watching John Kennedy's inaugural address. Then Sorensen spoke, saying that he was apologizing in advance for not sounding as eloquent as President Kennedy: "He had a better speechwriter than I have."

I ended up showing Jon Stewart's closing rally speech to both my classes today. While I disagree with Charli Carpenter that this will someday be seen as one of the Great American Speeches, it's a very good speech, and one whose content merits some reflection.

The speech was very much in line with some of Stewart's earlier reflections on needless partisanship in the media, particularly his epic Crossfire appearance. The main argument, that people who disagree should still be nice to each other, is hardly controversial. But he goes beyond that, saying that we really do need more comity in government, that excessive partisanship is hurting the country. As he said on Saturday:

We hear every damned day about how fragile our country is, on the brink of catastrophe, torn by polarizing hate, and how it's a shame that we can't work together to get things done. The truth is, we do! We work together to get things done every damned day! The only place we don't is here [the Capitol] or on cable TV!

But Americans don't live here, or on cable TV. Where we live, our values and principles form the foundation that sustains us while we get things done--not the barriers that prevent us from getting things done.

He then goes on to draw a rather creative metaphor of cars entering a tunnel, who still manage to merge from 20 lanes to two despite their various disagreements. But this is a false analogy. Liberals and conservatives can merge lanes, or work together in an office, or live together as neighbors because those tasks have very little to do with being liberals or conservatives. Those philosophies are governing philosophies. We should not expect liberals and conservatives to get along when making governing decisions the way they do in other aspects of life because those decisions are essential to what it means to be a liberal or a conservative. Compromises are, in some sense, betrayals. When a liberal adopts a conservative policy stance, she has made herself less liberal in the process, and she has disappointed or even betrayed her cohort. Yes, sometimes governing requires compromise, but it's quite another thing to suggest that ideologues should compromise for the sake of creating a more agreeable work environment.

A friend of mine (Hans Noel - see comments) also pointed out that the Jon Stewart at the rally would have some real disagreements with the Jon Stewart who interviewed President Obama last week. The latter Stewart was criticizing Obama for compromising too much on health care reform and other policy matters. He apparently wanted Obama to be more confrontational, regardless of how that affected the tone in Washington, because he thought the outcome was important.

And there's the rub. We always want politicians to be nicer to each other, until they're arguing about things we hold dear, and then we want them to fight tooth and nail for those things.

So, okay, he's being a little ideologically inconsistent here, but he's no worse than the rest of us. And I'm willing to grant some slack to the guy who created a battle of the bands between Ozzy Osbourne and Cat Stevens.